“Every system is a distributed system” has become a common catchphrase among distributed system theoreticians and distributed database vendors…and they’re right. What hasn’t become common are actionable discourse about what this concretely implies for real-world systems, and how it differs from the status quo. Drawing inspiration from and parallels with some of the lessons learned from our collective migration towards functional programming languages and data-orientation, I will attempt to provide part of one such discourse.
